BC 2026 Wave 1 – what’s actually changing in Manufacturing

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After 15 years on Business Central and NAV (and 30 in ERP overall) in factories across Europe, I’ve seen plenty of “Wave” releases. Most of them bring small UI improvements and minor fixes that are nice but don’t really move the needle for manufacturing teams. But 2026 Wave 1 feels different, at least for those of us who spend our days deep in the manufacturing module.

This time Microsoft has delivered two meaningful changes that many clients have been asking for, plus a handful of smaller improvements that will make daily life noticeably better.

1. Native Quality Management, Finally Here

This is the headline feature of the wave.

For years, if a client needed proper quality management they had two choices: buy an expensive ISV add-on or pay for custom development. Both options created upgrade headaches and extra costs. Now Microsoft has delivered a native Quality Management extension that installs automatically on new environments and is available from AppSource for existing ones.

The extension covers the full quality lifecycle: inspections triggered at purchase receipt or production output, non-conformities, corrective actions, and most importantly, strong integration with lot and serial tracking. This last point is especially valuable for food, pharmaceutical, and regulated industries.

I’ve been testing it in several sandboxes over the last few weeks. The integration with production output and reservations works cleanly in most standard scenarios, though I would still recommend careful testing if you have complex lot-tracking setups or heavy customisations.

My honest advice: if you’re a mid-sized manufacturer still managing quality with Excel, item attributes, or manual checklists, you should test this extension before renewing any third-party QC solution. It won’t replace a full MES quality module, but for standard Business Central environments it is a big, practical step forward.

2. Subcontracting, Finally Rebuilt Properly

The second significant change is a proper rebuild of subcontracting.

The old functionality was always quite limited. Many of us ended up using dummy work centres or custom flows just to make it work. The new version fixes the biggest pain points: full item tracking (lot and serial) now flows correctly in both directions, both when material leaves the factory and when finished goods come back; proper warehouse handling with bin and zone logic for both outbound and inbound movements; and the feature is activated through Feature Management, so you can test it safely in a sandbox before enabling it in production.

A quick note for partners with Italian clients: the old Italian-specific subcontracting functionality is being deprecated. If you have customisations built around the previous flow, you should start planning the migration before the June GA date.

Smaller but Welcome Improvements

A few other changes that won’t make the keynote slides but will make daily operations smoother:

• Item variants now support attributes directly from the variants list, with an easy sync option from the parent item.
• Standard approval workflows now extend to the Requisition Worksheet and Item Journals.
• Analysis Mode v2 brings 36 new read-only APIs, which is very useful for surfacing manufacturing data in external tools.
• The Power BI Supply Chain app is now included at no extra cost.
• The MCP Server is now standard and cannot be disabled.

Final Thoughts from the Field

For the last few waves, manufacturing has felt a little neglected compared to finance and supply chain. Wave 1 2026 changes that. Native Quality Management and a properly rebuilt subcontracting module address two real pain points that many mid-sized manufacturers have been living with for years.

This wave is not going to replace a full MES or advanced APS system, but for companies running mostly on standard Business Central with some custom AL, the gaps have become noticeably smaller.

I’m curious to hear how Wave 1 is behaving in your environments, especially if you’ve already started testing the new quality or subcontracting features. Feel free to drop me a message if you want to compare notes from real projects.